CONTEMPORARY ARTS
ART Goya. (Arts Council Gallery.) BRAWL and riot, torture and rapine, the sword through the chest and blood from the mouth, stench of corpses, the horrors and delights of sexual desire, the bull in the ring with hamstrings cut, the vanquished dis- membered and impaled on stakes; man looks in the mirror and sees ape, woman looks in the mirror and sees viper, the plucked chickens have human heads, goblins leer, Fear stalks abroad, bats and eagles darken the sky, witches gobble snakes and ride off into the night. What an extra- ordinary, elemental procession it is, this flow of cripples, beggars, soldiers and bull- fighters, niajas and mothers, vampires and monsters! It has been said many times, but remains true, that Goya stood at the cross- roads between old and modern painting. More, he stands at the crossroads of all the complexities and contradictions of Spain and of mankind. Here is the birth of the dark side of nineteenth-century romanticism, and the realism and spontaneity of impres- sionism (the first full title of the Desastres refers to '85 impressions'), not to mention particular quirks of style that proved useful a century later to artists from Ensor to Picasso; but here too one seems to hear the midnight swish of wings and broomsticks across the centuries from the Netherlands of Bosch and Breughel (which after all had Its own experience of Spain). Not only does realism go hand in hand with cryptic and enigmatic fantasy, but violence with tender- ness, scorn with a savage charity. The similarities between the period through which Goya lived and our own are too obvious to need stressing. Because he fell foul of the Inquisition, because he recorded the dilapidated vanities of the Court with such pitiless realism, because he went to street and field for his models, he has been claimed by the politicians of art. But Goya's politics were as muddled as his curiosity was intense. Anti-clericalism could not damp his admiration for the priests as they fought back against the invader; nationalism did not prevent him allying himself with the 'liberating' Josefmos; his records of the brutality of those looting, despoiling champions of liberty are con- versely the most bitter things he did. Least of all did he love humanity. In his great frieze of life and death there is scorn, contempt, and that irony which is the bitter fruit of disillusion in a noble spirit; seldom more than a fierce pity for suffering human flesh. Goya, it is true, was concerned with the 'what' of his statements, not the 'how,' but it is their strength, in the last analysis, that their author failed to identify himself completely with their subject. "I saw this," writes Goya in the margin, and the anguish and madness, the violence, the blood and the animal terror are lifted by the coldly passionate curiosity of the aficionado out of time into universality, so that they become almost as much records of Buchenwald and Hiroshima as of Madrid nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. The exhibition of drawings (99 from the Prado's 485), etchings and lithographs at 4 St. James's Square is probably the most important and exciting that the Arts Council has given us since the Mexican exhibition. Goya was a very great painter, but not the greatest; in his drawings and prints on the other hand, which date from the second half of his life (he was at least 45, perhaps 50, when he made the first notebook drawings known to us) he is the equal of Rembrandt, his acknowledged mentor. Here especially, in the expressive brushwork of the drawings and the bitter bite of the acid, can be seen that turbulent energy which swept him on through a late development to a maturity which hardly ceased to grow even in the last of his eighty-two years. The earliest etchings here are the careful copies of Velasquez made before 1778, like that of Philip IV's Isabel on horseback—a neat snowstorm of small feathery lines with no trace of that vitriol with which the later plates were to be bitten; there are groups from Los Caprichos, which date from the Nineties, Los Desastres and Tauromachia and Los Proverbios, all between 1808 and 1820. From the first quarter of the nine- teenth century, too, come the two main groups of drawings, in which colour, volume, movement, all find equally brilliant expres- sion. Recurrent illness shadowed the man with Beethoven's mouth. After total deaf- ness isolated him from the world, his inner eye developed its obscure, phantasmagorical violence; his outer eye became more critical, more ironic. "The dream of reason pro- duces monsters," runs the oft-quoted inscrip- tion to the 43rd Capricho: "Fantasy deserted by reason produces impossible monsters; united with reason, she is the mother of the arts and the source of wonders." Goya's men and monsters live side by side in the same world.
Spain is usually reluctant to contribute to foreign exhibitions, so this one is especially welcome. Our thanks, too, to Mr. Tomas Harris for his prints, and to those responsible
Previous page
